Meet Chef Kel
My Background
I grew up in rural Northwest Lower Michigan, just outside Traverse City, where food carried real weight — my mother kept a garden, and our family's biggest celebrations were built around the table. That's where my culinary education actually started, long before I ever set foot in a professional kitchen.
I trained formally at Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Oregon, a Le Cordon Bleu–affiliated program — so I like to say I land somewhere between “classically trained” and “raised by a woman who could feed twelve people out of one crock pot.”
Over 25 years in professional kitchens, Southern comfort food became my specialty: the kind of cooking that combines real technique with the warm feeling of someone's grandmother's kitchen.
Along the way, I added specialized training in culinary medicine — because the same instinct that sent my mother out to that garden every summer is the instinct behind cooking for someone's health.
Food was always how my family took care of each other, and culinary medicine gave me a more deliberate way to keep doing that: building meals around not just what a household loves, but what their bodies actually need.